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MESOAMERICA AND FRANCISCAN MISSION 267 and its expressions to the new reality. "Indian and Spanish mediators inter– vened in the initial process of negotiation of colonial domination. Those whose life experiences linked both worlds proved particularly important in the proc– ess; such would have been the case of Jeronimo de Aguilar or Alonso de Molina, among the Spaniards, while among the Indians, those who had received instruction at the friar's schools and subsequently collaborated with them in the study of Indian culture and the reformulation of the Christian message for its dissemination among the neophytes" (168). On the strength of a series of ex– amples the author is .able to make out a strong case for showing that Meso– american and Spanish mediators were very much active in giving shape to a co– lonial culture based on religion. The Book of the Conquest of Mexico, which is Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex, serves as the point of focus for Diana Magaloni-Kerpel's analysis, the scope of which is to pinpoint the sources for the images contained in the Twelfth Book. Magaloni-Kerpel, who is an art historian, declares at the outset: "I will show how through the drawings, the Christianized Nahua tlacuiloque (painter/writers) appropriated the Christian narrative of the Bible and inserted themselves into its story" (195). The Observant friars who had educated the na– tive collaborators of Sahagun, were prone to give a Bible-based interpretation of the origins of the peoples of the New World and of their conquest. One of such interpretations was that the natives of America were the lost tribes of Is– rael and that their reappearance signalled the end of the world. This worldview of the friars were inherited by their native disciples too. In keeping with the Christian prophetic tradition, Sahagun and his assistants depicted the last tlah– toani, Motecuhzoma as a Christ-like figure. Accordingly Motecuhzoma's down– fall got recast as prophetic fulfilment. "This 'vision of the vanquished' was a subversive appropriation of both the biblical narrative and European painting consistent with Nahua cosmology and painting-writing. These drawings were neither an act of surrender nor nostalgia, but a vision that, paradoxically, altered the past to help the vanquished conquer the future" (221). The role of the artists who executed the images in the Florentine Codex was that of being creative artists in the Post-Conquest Mesoamerica. They fit into the mimetic tradition, opines Jeanette Favrot Peterson. "The indigenous artists who crafted the Florentine images and, in the process their own identities, were asked to examine their professions both from within and outside of their cul– tures, at once the subject and object of their self-examination. Empowered to draw from a range of images, including their own toltecatl heritage, they selec– tively combined a variety of idioms. The presence of several modes of repre-